Last week was the 500th edition of Radio 4's 'The Moral Maze' - a programme which, like 'Thought For The Day', rarely fails to disappoint.
They chose to celebrate by asking the question 'what is the root of morality? Is it ultimately religious?' (well, that's my synopsis of the question they addressed, which was rather more long-winded).
I've posted a synopsis of the whole discussion followed by a critique of it on the Temple Cowley URC website (see 'links', right) together with a sermon based on it.
The discussion was fundamentally confused and inconclusive, partly because (as is usually the case on The Moral Maze) the people don't listen to each other and impose their own prejudices, but mainly because :
: most of the speakers were unable to recognise that the word 'God' refers, almost by definition in the Abrahamic faith traditions, to something that cannot be conceived and held in the human mind. The media bods behind the BBC seem to have this firm conviction that 'God' is some 'entity' that we can imagine in our minds, and of course the atheist participants concur wholeheartedly. For them, God is a human invention or superstition. In fact anything that can be created by the human mind cannot by definition be 'God' and we are condemning ourselves to forever talking at cross purposes.
: most of the speakers didn't seem to be able to distinguish between God and religion. Religion is a human response to the divine. The assumption that this is confined to 'conventional religious institutions' or even conventional religious language introduced a demarcation that made a proper dialogue impossible. Religion includes any behaviour that is a response to 'gods' (or 'idols') too. Thus, behaviour based on giving ultimate value to (say) the 'free market', or 'sex', constitutes religious behaviour - in these cases, idolatrous religious behaviour that inevitably demands sacrificial victims.
Sunday night saw Colin Blakemore, here in Oxford, present the seventh in the TV series Christianity : a History which again, true to form, perpetuated these misunderstandings. That was, until he interviewed the Revd David Paterson - an Anglican priest who's proved popular as a guest preacher at Temple Cowley URC. This is as I remember the conversation (which I recorded, so I could check)
Blakemore : So do you think the universe was created by God?
Paterson : No.
Blakemore : Do you believe in the virgin birth?
Paterson : No.
Blakemore : Do you believe Jesus even existed?
Paterson : Yes, I think he probably did.
Blakemore : So what, for you, is God?
Paterson : God is who I fell in love with and wanted to give my life to.
Blakemore : (lost for words).
Great TV moment! (Even if I might not go all the way with David P).
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Coincidence or what? Last night I picked up Herbert McCabe's Faith Within Reason, opened it randomly and found myself reading the following, which seems to go rather nicely with the Blakemore/Paterson interview :
"All created causes make a difference to the world. They are parts of the world which impose themselves on other parts of the world. When the hurricane has passed by, you can see that a hurricane has passed by; the world is different from what it was before. But God's creating and sustaining activity does not make the world different from what it is - how could it? It makes the world what it is. The specific characteristic effect of the Creator is that things should exist . . . But clearly there is no difference between existing and not existing. The world is not changed in any way by being created. If you like, you can talk about the horse before it began to exist and the horse after it began to exist (though it is an odd way of talking); but you must not say that there is any difference between the two, for if the horse before it began to exist was different, then a different horse would have come into existence.
A hurricane leaves its thumbprint on the world, but God does not leave any such thumbprint. We can say, 'This looks as though a hurricane has been here', but we cannot sensibly say, 'This looks as though God has been here.' That is why the famous 'Argument from Design' (commonly attributed to William Paley) is a silly one. You can't say, 'Look how the world is [orderly, complicated or whatever], so it must have been made by God'. You can no more say, 'This sort of world must have been made by God', than you can say, 'This sort of world must exist'. .
God's activity, then, does not compete with mine. Wheras the activity of any other creature makes a difference to mine and would interfere with my freedom, the activity of God makes no difference. It has a more fundamental and important job to do than making a difference. It makes me have my own activity in the first place. I am free; I have my own spontaneous activity not determined by other creatures, because God makes me free. Not free of him (this would be to cease to exist), but free of other creatures.
The idea that God's causality could interfere with my freedom can only arise from an idolatrous notion of God as a very large and powerful creature - a part of the world. We see an ascending scale of powerful causes. The more powerful the cause, the more difference it makes. And we are inclined to locate God at the top of the scale, and to imagine that he makes the most difference of all. But God does not make the most difference. He makes, if you like, all the difference - which is the same as making no difference at all. So far as the kind of world we have is concerned, the atheist and the theist will expect to see exactly the same features. The only difference is that if the atheist were right, the question would not arise - indeed the atheist would not arise."
(p.75 - 6)
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